Evacuation

A Civil Defense pamphlet of 1955, “Four Wheels to Survival” recommended automobiles as an effective weapon of personal defense, able to move “many times as far as the strongest of you could go on foot,”  and many times faster.  The car was promoted as a safety zone, a mobile evacuation center for family and friends, for “you and as many others as can be comfortably seated,” in this era before seat belts were mandatory.   During the Cold War, the best defense was to get people out of the radiation fallout zones as quickly as possible.  The Civil Defense recommended keeping food and blankets, water, first aid, and tools handy.  “The food you’ll need can be based on the 7-day supply suggested by the Federal Civil Defense Administration in its ‘Grandma’s Pantry’ program. Keep these emergency rations in a carton, ready to be put into the car trunk.”

Life magazine explained how a nuclear explosion could give some warning before radioactive fallout reached surrounding areas, in a special issue on “The Drive for Mass Shelters,” in January, 1962.  Fallout “is formed when the mighty fireball of a bomb (which may be one to 10 miles in diameter) touches the surface of the earth.  Its temperature of many millions of degrees vaporizes everything it touches – buildings, roads, people, and enough rock and earth to burn out a crater a thousand feet or more wide and a hundred feet deep.  As the fireball rises, its burden of matter, made radioactive by proximity to the explosion, rises with it and cools.  Vaporized particles of matter combined with radioactive products of the fission process now begin to resolidify, first the metals, later the soil particles and other substances.  The congealed particles start to fall within 15 to 30 minutes and constitute the deadly rain for which the shelter program is designed.”[i]

Tips from Four Wheels include, “Shelter in an unexpected blast is a bonus you get from your car. Tests under an actual atomic explosion in Nevada proved that modern cars, especially those with turret top construction, give a degree of protection against blast heat and radiation.  Before an attack, roll the windows down to equalize pressures and to prevent glass breakage. Crouch or lie down, below the level of the windows. After an attack, windows should be raised to keep out as much dust as possible; it may be contaminated by radio-active fallout.  More importantly, the car provides a small movable house. You can get away in it—then live, eat, and sleep in it in almost any climatic conditions, if necessary, until a civil defense emergency is ended.”

If there is one defensive maneuver at which interstates excel, it is moving people from areas in jeopardy to safety.  Outside of the science fiction scenarios of the Cold War, most evacuations occur in advance of hurricanes.  Traffic jams headed out of Louisiana before Hurricane Georges in 1998 provoked officials to authorize “contraflow” lane reversal for future evacuations.  This allows traffic flow in the lanes on the opposite side of the divider, so that all lanes lead out of the threatened area.  After a number of tests, traffic engineers established rules to keep vehicles moving: a great deal of public information before the event, through TV and radio news; a limited number of exits, generally 90 miles or so inland; and removing highway patrol officers from blocked exits (because so many people stopped to ask for directions, or complain that they couldn’t get off the interstate).

Hurricane Katrina exposed the inequity of the mandatory call for evacuations in the city of New Orleans – many people had no way to get out.  There was no transportation for the public. If a family didn’t have a working vehicle there was no option.  They stayed in place.

Following the storm, haunting images of loss and abandonment traveled around the world.  There had been sufficient warning time for passenger trains, buses, and vanpools to be organized, but none were in place.  In the Superdome there were tens of thousands of refugees, and only about 1000 National Guard troops to keep order. Buses, finally sent in three days after the floods, were sent to the Causeway-Interstate-10 interchange, nearly 10 miles away.  Residents waited.  “What they soon learned was the Guard's resistance was a bluff. If someone wanted to leave, they wouldn't be stopped. But Guardsmen did everything they could to discourage people from wading into the surrounding floodwaters. They were under orders to keep the burgeoning crowd contained to the Dome footprint. But if people wanted to leave and were persistent enough, the Guard would not stand in their way.”[ii]  The official death count was ten people: six from natural causes, one from a possible suicide or accident, and three bodies that apparently drowned in the nearby floodwaters and washed up at the Dome.  In all, 828 buses arrived, taking a cargo of about 50 evacuees per bus, 41,400 evacuees, across the country, to Houston or Atlanta first, and then on to many other stops. 

The New Orleans Convention Center “would morph into a living hell that became the symbol of all that went wrong in Katrina's aftermath. A crowd eventually pegged at more than 25,000 packed and trashed the place, while waiting for an armada of buses that took the better part of a week to arrive. Day after day, throngs stewed in broiling heat with scant water and food and no plumbing whatsoever. Police rushed into the facility intermittently and just as quickly retreated, mounting at best a spasmodic security effort. The only food and water that would arrive in the first few days came courtesy of looters who raided nearby shops and hotels.” [iii]  At least four people died.  At the end, helicopters flew survivors from the Convention Center parking lot to transit lots with clear routes out of the city.

The delay of public transport until after the disaster led to death, inhumane conditions, and extended confusion due to the separation and dislocation of family members.  Somewhere between 350,000 and 600,000 people were displaced.  The dire conditions exposed the privilege of class, and illustrated the unpleasant truth that survival could be bought with adequate resources: a car, friends and family, or a hotel room beyond the danger zone.

In stark contrast to the failures of Katrina was the planning and implementation of Operation Pied Piper.  Over the six years of WWII, more than two million children were sent away from their family homes, mostly in London, for the Welsh and English countryside.  They were returned to their families, some as early as 1940 after the worst of the Blitz was over, although many children came home later in the war.

“We boarded the train, a steamer of course, and off we went. No one was told where we were going, I do not think even my mother knew. It was all very exciting for us children; a train ride was THE way to travel for us working-class kids!  After an eternity the train came to a station where we were told to get out. In a big clearing in front of the station were lots of buses, all seemed chaos at the time — my brother went on one bus, I went on another and I do not know where our mother went. My bus drove off and eventually came to a halt outside a building that was obviously a school, where we disembarked and marched into a hall. There seemed to be people moving about all over the place, with adults moving off with children, the hall was looking a lot emptier by the minute. Eventually I was taken off by two people to a house quite close to the school.”[iv]

Evacuations are mobilized with rapid necessity in storms and wartime, but also due to other manmade hazards.  Mass evacuations against the danger of radioactive fallout have been used following major nuclear disasters.  After Chernobyl in 1986, nothing could be brought away from the farms and cottages within the exclusion zone in a 30-km radius, and that boundary remains in place today. It remains to be seen whether the radiation boundary around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant will allow evacuees to return someday. 

Even six years after Katrina, 29% of the population of New Orleans, over 140,000 people, has not yet returned.  The network of relatives and friends that form the first line of support for evacuees has long since given way to temporary housing and new situations for living. Evacuation can be permanent.

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[i] Life, January 12, 1962, p. 39.

[ii] Jeff Duncan, “Refuge of last resort 1.” The Times-Picayune, August 30, 2006.

[iii] James Varney, “They came seeking refuge, then suffered days in anguish.” The Times-Picayune,  August 29, 2006

[iv] Patrick Devine, January 2000, WW2 The People’s War,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/38/a2714438.shtml.

Unlimited Windows

Openings represent the weakest point in a wall, and constitute the permeability of the edge where trespass and intrusion are most likely. Doors and windows shape the building façade, presenting a rhythm of propriety to the outside world but also producing the natural light necessary to perform tasks on the inside of the wall.  This dichotomy challenges architects to resolve the sometimes incompatible: organization and available light, security and transparency.

The simplest openings are just that, open, but mankind finds ways to screen the outside; the earliest closures used plant materials and animal hides. The first use of glass as a building material by the Romans in 300 BCE allowed visual connection with the outside without noise, dust, and thermal discomfort from the raw climate. Window glass remained uncommon until the 1600’s, and only important rooms had glazed openings – other openings had shutters. In 1696 the English placed a tax on windows, ensuring that common people avoided putting windows into unimportant spaces… including bedrooms, servant’s rooms, privies, and anywhere that didn’t require daylight.

The window tax didn’t end until 1851, when construction of the Crystal Palace in London demanded the resources of the nation’s glassmakers for a building made entirely of windows. Joseph Paxton designed the Crystal Palace for “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations.” Celebrating industrial practice and culture, the exposition structure embodied the most advanced technology of its time – an enclosure of 990,000 square feet 1,851 feet long by 128 feet high, constructed with a frame of cast iron columns and trusses supporting 293,655 individual panes of glass. It was a marvel of engineering.

Glass can make entire walls disappear; the boundary between inside and out becomes potential and not permanent.  The Crystal Palace changed the way people approached architecture, and challenged accepted modes of living.  With glazing, the world outside might be threatening, but one could see its dangers and its beauty without participating in it.  A small pane of glass could become a plane of glass, opening up new experiments in living – conservatories, sunrooms, and cupolas, sheltered but transparent, lifted out of the darkness of rooms lit by lanterns and meager framed windows.  From the ganged windows of factories to the flight of the Farnsworth House, glass replaced walls and roofs, expanding interiors by borrowing from the outside.  The view from the villa becomes a daring exploration of pure space, barely interrupted by the requirements of jamb and mullion.

Bill Bryson writes, “Today we are used to encountering glass in volume, but to someone living in 1851 the idea of strolling through cubic acres of airy light inside a building was dazzling…. It would have appeared as delicate and evanescent, as miraculously improbable, as a soap bubble.”

With new technologies, windows have realized greater strength than their nineteenth century predecessors. Windows stiffened with stainless steel splines, laminated with multiple layers of glass and interlayers of Lexan, can resist bullets and blasts, hurricane winds and debris impacts. These armoured plates are no longer the weakest link in the wall, but the one thing they cannot do is… open. Therefore, these may be the riskiest windows of all, demanding mechanical ventilation 100% of the time and eliminating all possibility of egress in an unthinkable scenario.

Modern technology provides defenses against other enemies – ultraviolet rays, solar heat gain, and glare. Glass coatings defy climatic foes, improve energy efficiency, and allow windows to expand to previously unrealized sizes. (The largest single window in the world was made for the Dubai Aquarium, measuring 21 feet wide by 18 feet high, comprised of 15 inch-thick acrylic polymer.  Although it does not connect inside and outside, it does link people to a vibrant environment on the other side of the window.) 

We have arrived at infinite possibilities for designing windows, from small penetrations in a solid mass to an entire building clothed in glass.  From the Miesian drapery of transparent walls to the deformations of geometry by Frank Gehry, architects have choices.  Yet the responsibility to design the thoughtful location of pane and plane, with proper respect given to the climate and orientation where it rests no longer allows a complete default to mechanical systems for light and ventilation to heat and cool the interiors.  Mies designed the Lake Shore Towers in Chicago without air conditioning, abdicating the issue entirely but leaving occupants to swelter in Midwestern summers, reducing energy use in direct concordance with comfort.

Without openings we are blind, disconnected from weather, daylight, fresh air, street life, and human congress. The provision of windows is so critical that building codes regulate the minimum size of windows in living and sleeping areas.  It’s a long way from the punitive taxes of earlier times.

Openings

Openings represent the weakness within a wall, and constitute the permeable edge where trespass and intrusion are most likely. Doors and windows present the building façade to the outside world and produce the daylight necessary to perform tasks on the inside of the wall – a dichotomy that challenges architects to resolve the sometimes incompatible: organization and available light.

The earliest openings were just that, but mankind found ways to screen the outside with plant materials and animal hides. The discovery of glass (over 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, but probably first used by the Romans as a building material in 300 BCE) allowed visual connection with the outside without any of the noise, dust, and thermal discomforts from the raw climate. Window glass remained uncommon until the 1600’s, and only important rooms had glazed openings – other openings had shutters. In 1696 the English placed a tax on windows, ensuring that common people avoided putting windows into unimportant spaces… including bedrooms, servant’s rooms, privies, and anywhere that didn’t require daylight. The tax didn’t end until 1851, when construction of the Crystal Palace demanded the resources of the nation’s glassmakers for a building made entirely of windows.

Glass can make entire walls disappear; the boundary becomes potential and not permanent. This was the intent of Joseph Paxton in 1851 when he designed the Crystal Palace for “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations.” Celebrating industrial practice and culture, the exposition structure embodied the most advanced technology of its time – an enclosure of 990,000 square feet, 1,851 feet long by 128 feet high, constructed with a frame of cast iron columns and trusses supporting 293,655 individual panes of glass. It was a marvel of engineering. Bill Bryson writes, “Today we are used to encountering glass in volume, but to someone living in 1851 the idea of strolling through cubic acres of airy light inside a building was dazzling…. It would have appeared as delicate and evanescent, as miraculously improbable, as a soap bubble.”

With new technologies, windows have realized greater strength than their nineteenth century predecessors. Windows stiffened with stainless steel splines, laminated with multiple layers of glass and interlayers of Lexan, can resist bullets and blasts, hurricane winds and debris impacts. These armoured plates are no longer the weakest link in the wall, but the one thing they cannot do is… open. Therefore, these may be the riskiest windows of all, demanding mechanical ventilation 100% of the time and eliminating all possibility of egress in an unthinkable scenario. 

Technology provides defenses against other enemies – ultraviolet rays, solar heat gain, and glare. Glass coatings defy climatic foes, improve energy efficiency, and allow windows to expand to previously unrealized sizes. (The largest single window in the world was made for the Dubai Aquarium, measuring 21 feet wide by 18 feet high, comprised of 15 inch-thick acrylic polymer.) 

Walls are made to divide, while openings join together. Without openings we are blind, disconnected from weather, daylight, fresh air, street life, and human congress. Without openings, we would rely on the artificial environment 100% of the time, to heat and cool, dry and humidify, light and color and exhaust our rooms. Studies show that children perform better in daylighted classrooms, with increased productivity, better retention, and improved morale. The only rooms without windows should be uninhabited spaces, for machines and not people.

New Year in Mumbai

My travel companions and I had been on flights for days, travelling from Mississippi to Mumbai.  As we left Heathrow, heading east, we realized not only that we would arrive near midnight on New Year’s Eve, but that we could celebrate the new year in each time zone along the way.  

When we arrived, there was the typical chaos of a foreign airport: unknown customs, money exchange, and baggage retrieval.  The wait for our bags was quite extended, and people were restless to be away with their families; we could hear celebrations outside.  The luggage hall was marble-tiled and quiet with exhaustion, but the muttering began as we waited.  A young man lifted the flap on the conveyor to see if anything was happening, and shouts rose from inside.  I had time to see open bags, and frantic searches by the baggage handlers before the flap was lowered, but the bags began to arrive immediately afterwards.  Two of our group had locked their suitcases, and those locks had been broken and the contents overturned.  We would discover later that all electronic items had been pilfered, but only from the locked cases.  My unlocked bag was untouched.

We exited into a rush of taxi-wallahs, all clamoring for our business.  We were to spend one night in an airport hotel, and the only man in the group, an older Sri Lankan returning to Asia for the first time in years, went back inside to find coins and call for the shuttle.  That left four young women on the curb as the midnight hour struck, surrounded by men chattering in English, Hindi, and all manner of dialects.  Our general lack of enthusiasm hardly dampened theirs, until the pink shuttle bus arrived from the Orchid Hotel, and they melted away. 

The short ride from the airport to the hotel fulfilled all of our stereotypical expectations of India.   The slums of Dharavi are right there.  Even in darkness we could see a tremendous gap in the city fabric: handmade enclosures, common water taps, children sleeping in the open, watchmen guarding refuse piles, the clutter and density of human inhabitation within circumstances hardly imaginable to us.  It was our New Year’s Eve, but not their Diwali celebration, so there were occasional fireworks, clusters of people sitting around fires, and children playing late in the darkness; all this activity contained on one side of a smooth new highway lined with billboards for cell phones and Bollywood movies.  The infrastructure was built to get tourists from the city to the airport on new tarmac, and a wall to hide the teeming informal settlements from view was sure to follow.

We pulled up at the Orchid, and it was as if we had magically teleported right back to London.  We entered the lobby’s multi-story atrium - a party was underway in the second-level disco, and there were beautiful Eurasian women in high heels and short skirts, accompanied by young men in bespoke suits, drinking champagne and laughing.  The elevator was filled with these ephemeral creatures, so we left the girl who had overpacked two huge duffels, and humped our single cases up three flights of wool-carpeted stairs.  At the rooms, we were confused by the eco-feature requiring the room card key to be inserted for lights and ventilation – it was 2001 by only a few minutes, but none of us had ever seen this system before.  The amenities were fabulous – spa settings on the tub and showerheads, fluffy towels, and of course, Western toilets. 

It would be a long time until we saw such luxury again, as we traversed the country.  We became accustomed to the juxtaposition of abject poverty and profligate luxury, between the extensive natural resources and intensive degradation of the land.  We stayed in private homes, racetrack clubs, restored boat houses, political guesthouses, ashrams, and in Pondicherry we were guests in the Governor’s Mansion.  Every place told a story from a civilization more ancient than our own and a place long inhabited.  Our preconceptions were gone by our second day in India, in this puzzling place where everyone had a cell phone and no one a landline, where infrastructure was elaborate except where it didn’t exist, where neighbors across state lines couldn’t communicate unless they did so in English.  Adaptability is the most useful thing to pack.

Indeterminate Space

As young adults, most of us spent a lot of time in transitional spaces - neither within nor without, incompletely lit and arbitrarily organized - occupying them in ways that mirrored our own lack of fixedness in opinion, friendship, ambition, and lifestyle.

Transitional spaces are not only transportation spaces, but there is  overlap; bus stops are the last resort of those without autos, but so are sidewalks, stations, and bridges.  Rooftops, empty lots, childless playgrounds, embankments, docks, trails, underpasses… young people spend a lot of time outdoors, seeking a new view of the world, or the company of others, or the adventures denied in their everyday pursuits of school, and chores, and modesty.

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time outdoors at night.  My friends and I would linger in stadium stands, parks and soccer fields.  We were tied to trees on the hillsides of Tantalus, saved later by older brothers and treated to a terrifying ride down the mountain in the back of a pickup.  We traversed hotel balconies on the eleventh floor, strolling through empty guest rooms to escape, still unscathed.  We would dare each other to slip naked beneath the crashing waves, to be the last one out in the freezing darkness before bodysurfing in to shore.  There were never consequences. We reveled in the terror of nighttime exploits, tired of the programmed spaces of classroom, chapel, gymnasium, bedroom – every room with a purpose, but none for dreams.

Humans speak more freely in darkness than in daylight.  Movement and wind, unknown shadows and sounds inspire confidences in one another.  Sharing the experience of deprivation, triumph and lust releases inhibitions.  Young people need emotion, the overwhelming acknowledgement of perception, the rush of blood that accompanies fear and trials. 

We never grow out of the need for spaces of potential, for unprogrammed and loosely defined places.  In cities, rapid deindustrialization and shrinking urban populations have supplied new space for occupation by informal economies and activities.  The cracked lots previously for car sales, warehouses emptied of their goods, and apartments long unserviced by power and water, encourage spontaneity and artistic experimentation.

In recent months, we have seen the occupation of public spaces by a vocal new crowd, united not by age or faith or even intent, but by an emotion that is no longer willing to be limited by fear.  In spaces across the globe, with virtuous slogans of wealth-sharing and equality, justice and rage begat by the lack of corporate accountability.  “Representation through occupation” reads one of the signs.  Sparked in part by the similar intensity of the Arab Spring uprisings against power and tyranny, Occupy Wall Street appeals to those who were too young for the sit-ins of the 1960’s and the civil rights movement, but who wish to contribute their time to an ideal, albeit one with a still-undefined outcome.  The tent cities and bonfires, the overwhelming visual attack of handmade signs and vandalism of corporate identity, have returned these planned and formal green spaces to indeterminacy.  The protestors have made places of conflict out of the formal lands developed by commerce and government, and have created the necessary incompleteness in the system to allow spontaneity to thrive.

Architects continue to experiment in making indeterminate space, especially within places of culture, loci of creativity.  Provocative spaces for learning such as SANAA’s Rolex Center in Lausanne, empty the frame of the wall with floor to ceiling glazing, and establish circulation paths that curl in waves beneath the feet of university students.  The fiercely iconographic patterning of the façade and dogmatic geometry of the CCTV tower in Beijing by Rem Koolhaas, “promotes the void as the structuring agency of the new urban form,” according to the New York Times.  We work awfully hard to capture and collect playfulness in structures that must act as anything but. 

We desire the rough achievement of gaining safe ground, but only after experiencing a tremor of thrill, a doubt, a connection, a surprise.  The best spaces have unclear corners, hidden lighting, tangible air movement, sudden views back to where you have already been…. We need look no further than our nearest abandoned warehouse for inspiration.

Treasure

The most efficient way to preserve the potential for life, paradoxically, is cold and snow, darkness and ice. The most treasured resources of mankind are the seeds of crops once grown across the globe in small gardens and wild preserves, in forests and wetlands, along river valleys and canyon cliffs. Collected, they offer a glimpse of the potential to fulfill dreams: cures for animal and plant diseases, insect-resistance, drought-tolerance, explosive fertility and exceptional harvests. Seeds are stored by the Global Crop Diversity Trust in an ark – a secure, underground cavern devoted to preserving the world’s plant resources – in the tiny island of Spitsbergen in the arctic Svalbard archipelago of Norway. The treasures are duplicate samples of seeds held in 1400 other gene banks, and in the event of cataclysmic losses of crops and caches worldwide, could be the last survivors. 

The site was chosen because of the permafrost, which naturally maintains temperatures close to freezing year-round, reducing the possibility of seed sprouting. The site is 130 m above sea level, and the island has no history of tectonic activity. The sandstone bedrock of the tunneled site shields the seeds from harmful radiation or exposure to light, with limited supply of oxygen to further slow deterioration. The vaults can store 4.5 million samples, from the estimated 1.5 million distinctly varied crops thought to exist (in 2009, at the one year anniversary of its dedication, it held approximately one-third of known crop species.) The Global Seed Vault’s mission is to provide a safety net against accidental loss of diversity, whether through neglect, mismanagement, destruction, war, fire, or other events, either natural or manmade.

Norway’s Directorate of Public Construction and Property led the construction of the vault within an old copper mine, only 800 miles from the North Pole. Crops such as peas may survive for 20-30 years, but sunflowers and grains may survive for hundreds of years. Even with the protections of the site and structure, the seeds will one day lose the ability to germinate. A constant stream of replacement seeds are supplied by taking seeds from the stored samples, planting, harvesting, and replacing them in storage.

The vault is unassailable, beyond the reach of accidental harm and with limited access for intentional acts. But this is not an architecture which can become a model for most communities, or can accommodate most functions. The exposed entrance is beautiful, logical, and practical… but the majority of the project exists in extreme temperatures, low oxygen, and severely restricted light. This prototype exemplifies “inhumane” conditions, but it is not for humans, after all.

The treasures with which we live are susceptible to loss, through burglary and vandalism, flood and fire. As the creators of shelter for humans and their goods, architects take on the mantle of public health, safety, and welfare. We rejoice in light and air, moderate temperatures and access to the outside. We consider security, but not at the expense of beauty. People cannot live in suspended animation like the seeds of Svalbard.

“Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.” Epicurus

Abundance

Feverish accumulation of strange and wonderful things began with the Renaissance exploration of the world in the fifteenth century, and exploded in contests between philosophers, popes, and emperors to field collections of botany, geology, alchemy, medicine, and archaeology.  The catalogue of Collection of Rarities assembled by John Tradescant in the 1630’s documents curiosities such as: “Nunnes penitential Girdles of Haire, A Bracelet made of the thighes of Indian flyes, Edward the Confessors knit gloves, Divers night-caps made of grasse, A little Box with the 12 Apostles in it, Variety of Chains, made of the teeth of Serpents, A book of all the Stories in the glasse-windowes of Sancta Sophia lim'd in vellum by a Jew, Flea chains of silver and gold with 300 links a piece and yet but an inch long, A piece of the Stone of Sarrigo-Castle where Helen of Greece was born….”

Cabinets of Curiosities were assembled as symbolic demonstrations of power and influence.  The urge toward accumulation, and the juxtapositions that resulted from the excess, fueled collectors’ passion.  Inspiration found in the random placement of serpent’s teeth and nuns’ girdles led to more careful cataloguing of the provenance and history of the objects, with annotations of botanical, medical, and skeletal remains. Haphazardness made possible only by the sheer volume of objects gave way to scientific classification.  Matching like with like may have started as a parlor game, but the groupings that organize artifacts through taxonomies of time, place, antecedents, or other natural relationships were later encoded in the nomenclature of science.

As collections grew, in place of a cabinet, architecture became the spatial organizer and the generator for contemplation about relationships between objects and systems.  

The Gesta Grayorum (1594), a court revel performed before Queen Elizabeth I and attributed to Francis Bacon, described an imaginary research facility containing “a most perfect and general library” and “a spacious, wonderful garden” filled with wild and cultivated plants and surrounded by a menagerie, aviary, freshwater lake, and saltwater lake. Spaces for living nature were complemented by a museum of science, art, and technology – “a goodly huge cabinet” housing artifacts (“whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff”), natural oddities (“whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced”), and gems, minerals, and fossils (“whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept”). The fourth and final component was a space in which to test nature, “a still-house, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and vessels as may be a palace fit for a philosopher's stone.’ [i]

Bacon’s imaginary place brings together natural history and science, medicine and engineering within one edifice, a trove of all of the abundance of the world through all times in history.  We  can accomplish this today with a computer and a connection, and yet we demand so much more.  Many of the botanic and animal specimens of the 1600’s are endangered today because of our overuse of the world’s abundance.  Instead of preserving habitats and cultures in place to continue production of the unique and exotic, we collect and number the dwindling species, study and classify their remains, and archive them in cabinets with humidity and temperature control.  By making these fragments ours we ensure their rarity, and perhaps extinction; after all, the archetypal dodo was one of the star attractions of the Ashmolean Museum, the successor to John Tradescant’s collection. 

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[i] Paula Findlen, Early Modern Science.  The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 3, 2006.